


Fox on the Run

by Sholio



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Backstory, Families of Choice, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Parent-Child Relationship, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-13 20:40:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11192994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: When bounty hunters get the drop on Yondu, 11-year-old Peter is the only person in a position to do anything about it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I decided to go ahead and post this one as a WiP since it's turning out longer than expected, although there are only going to be two chapters (probably). Second one will be up in a few days, most likely.

It was likely things would have gone even more sideways if Quill hadn't run off (again) at what turned out to be the worst/best possible time, which occurred to Yondu much later, but didn't make it any less annoying at the time.

"I'm gonna skewer that little bastard. Spit him like a festival roast," he muttered to no one in particular, arrow warmed up and humming at his side. People scurried out of his way; even the rough crowd that frequented a place like this (perhaps _especially_ those people) recognized the predator in their midst, and instinctively drew away from the red gleam of death in his eyes.

And of course Quill had to go and disappear on Tirenth, a seamy hell hole of a planet with no government to speak of. Which was what made it appealing to the Ravagers; anything, no matter how illegal, could be bought and sold here. Anything ... which could definitely include one (1) scrawny Terran brat, for slavery, sex, or meat.

Dirty snow crunched under his boots. Shit weather. He oughta just go back to the ship, leave the brat here to teach him a lesson. Come back and scoop him up in a week, drag him out of whatever brothel or slave pen he'd gotten himself into, and if he wasn't here to be retrieved, too damn bad ...

A hard shudder worked its way through Yondu: sudden visceral memories of what the pens were actually _like_ , the smell of rotten meant from the corpse chained to you, that they hadn't bothered cleaning up until a week later -- the torture devices they used to keep the prisoners in line --

And Tirenth was one of the places that channeled slaves into the Kree Empire, which was something best not thought about if he ever wanted to sleep again.

So yeah, he was going to track down Quill's wayward ass and haul him back to the M-ship at arrowpoint, was what he was going to do. And this time maybe he'd ban the kid from leaving the _Eclector_ for a couple of months. Quill _loved_ going planetside; it was one of the few threats that might actually stand a chance of making an impact on the ball of rocks Peter Quill called a head.

He wanted to say it was because he had his mind on Quill, because he was busy scanning the crowd for Terran skin and the kid's fluffy head of hair, that he didn't notice the other danger closing in on him. But maybe he wouldn't have noticed anyway; it wasn't something he'd had to deal with before, not something he knew to be alert for.

Static washed over him in a prickling shock, rippling down his spin from the implant, and the arrow went suddenly dead, slipping from under his coat to land in the snow.

"What th' --" It _hurt_ , hurt like taking an elbow to the nuts -- a buzzing staticky feedback feeling in the implant itself, a tingling bruised feeling throughout his brain. Made it hard to think, definitely made it hard to defend himself against the six or seven enormous bruiser types who closed in on him. The crowd moved aside from that too, not being ones to go out of their way to interfere in what was obviously none of their business. 

Even sick from the shock of the implant and minus his arrow, Yondu killed two of them before they knew what was happening, one with a knife and the other with the small blaster hidden up his sleeve.

But then they got smart and started working as a team. They didn't have a lot of clever moves on their side, but they had numbers and size. One of them broke his arm; he felt the bone snap as the blaster fell from his suddenly numb fingers. They drove him to the ground, punching, kicking, clubbing him with fists almost as thick as Yondu's thigh and armored along the edge. He wasn't sure what these guys were -- massive, muscular, their bodies so heavily armored with ridges of bone that they didn't need to wear much in the way of clothing. Some species were made to be muscle for hire. Maybe literally made, who knew. 

Wasn't something he had much time to wonder about, not with blows raining down on his head, ribs, chest -- head especially, _implant_ especially, driving him down to darkness.

 

***

 

Peter watched it all go down from not too far away, sitting with his back against a chimney on the metal roof of one of the ramshackle, two- and three-story houses in this district. He stayed very quiet, gloved hands clenched under his arms while dry snowflakes sifted down on his hair and the Walkman headphones looped around his neck. He wasn't reckless enough to think he could go up against a half-dozen mean-looking aliens, and he wasn't entirely sure he _wanted_ to, not on Yondu's behalf.

What they had going on lately was a battle of wills. Peter wasn't entirely sure how old he was -- time was hard to judge in deep space, on a ship that used several different calendars, none of which bore the slightest resemblance to the one he was used to. His best guess was that he was probably about eleven. His initial year or two on board Yondu's ship had been mainly composed of fear and a desperate desire to please, punctuated by bouts of fury. Lately, though, he was outgrowing the desire to please that used to have him constantly tagging around at Yondu's heels, and growing into the sullen awareness that he never _was_ going to please the rat bastard space pirate who'd kidnapped him and dragged him off to the ends of the universe, so instead, he was going to get some respect out of the old jerkwad if it killed him.

Which it might end up doing, at Yondu's hands or otherwise. He'd already been threatened with the arrow multiple times, and he was slowly starting to realize that he could actually push Yondu very far indeed without the arrow threat being carried out. So far the worst that had happened was Yondu stabbing him through the collar, hanging him on the wall in the main mess hall, and leaving him dangling there until Peter managed to squirm free of his shirt, uninjured except for a mild burn on his shoulder. The rest of the pirates seemed to think it was hilarious.

He felt that he should have enjoyed watching Yondu taken down a notch or two. He'd spent the last three years unable to lay a hand on the blue jerk without getting himself knocked flat on the floor. But instead of laughing, Peter just felt sick, watching them pummel him relentlessly even after he was down on the ground and not moving.

The slow crawling fear wormed through him that they might actually kill Yondu, and ... maybe he should have been glad about that too ( _abducted me, took me from my home, from the people who loved me_ ) but instead it cramped the pit of his stomach into a painful knot. Peter reached under his coat to put his hand on the gun Yondu had given him and taught him to use. He wasn't confident about his ability to hit a target from this distance, but maybe he could scare them a little bit, get them to stop --

But then they quit kicking Yondu and started dragging him off, leaving a trail of dark-blue blood through the snow. Peter scrambled quietly down from the rooftop. He paused briefly where the attack had happened. The two dead dinosaur-dudes Yondu had taken down were still lying in the snow; Peter gave them a wide berth. From the rooftop, he'd seen them snap Yondu's arrow into pieces, so he looked around until he found it lying in the snow and picked it up.

He'd never touched it before. Broken, it seemed like a toy in his gloved palm, nothing but shards of metal and plastic. A faint hot-metal smell lingered around it, along with what Peter had, over the last couple of years, come to recognize as the smell of blood, like tasting a copper penny on his tongue.

He tucked the pieces into his coat, and then he followed them through the winding streets of the town.

This was something he was pretty good at, after a couple of years of Yondu's lessons. School had been replaced for the most part by studying what the pirates called sneak-thievin', which as far as Peter knew was why they'd kept him instead of dropping him off on some other planet or taking him back home: because he was small, light-fingered, and filled a necessary gap in their skill set. Never mind that he hadn't known the first thing about pickpocketing, tailing, or making himself vanish in a crowd when Yondu abducted him. Yondu had been the Fagin to Peter's Oliver Twist, teaching him the knack of cutting purses and dipping his fingers into pockets -- and following people without being seen, hiding behind taller individuals in the crowd, falling back whenever they seemed to be getting wise to him.

The idea of calling the ship for help didn't even occur to him. He didn't think of the pirates as people he could go running to in a crisis. About the only person on the ship he _did_ kinda -- sorta -- well, it wasn't _trust_ exactly. It wasn't. But if he was ever going to call someone for help if he got in trouble, Yondu was that person, and if Yondu was in trouble, where did that leave Peter, exactly?

Well, he was armed: gun under his coat, knife up his sleeve, knife in his boot. He didn't have a plan; he honestly didn't see how in the world he could take out a bunch of guys who looked like rhinos crossed with a triceratops. All he could really think to do was see where they took Yondu and then figure out what to do next. 

Maybe the best thing to do would be to look for a different kind of help. A police station, maybe, or some kind of office for dealing with lost kids. They should have something like that here, shouldn't they? He could just walk away, find a cop, tell them that he'd been kidnapped and had gotten away from his abductors.

He could have done it on a dozen worlds after Yondu started letting him leave the ship with the crew. He'd certainly run away enough. But he never went far. Sometimes Yondu caught him, sometimes he came back on his own, but he never stayed gone.

There were more traces of blue blood in the snow. Peter closed the distance a little bit, just in time to see the dino-dudes dragging Yondu through the doors of a friggin' fortress.

It wasn't very tall, no taller than most of the buildings around it, but it was massive. This town was perched on the edge of a plateau, and the fortress was on the very lip of it, built into the wall ringing the town. Peter had seen it from above as they'd flown in, a stone wall marching along the edge of the plateau with guard towers every so often and that squat fortress clinging to the top of the cliffside.

The door slammed shut behind them with a very final clang. No way he was sneaking in there, at least not anytime soon.

Not through the front door, anyway.

So Peter spent a bit of time reconnoitering. There were cameras around the door, but not farther along the wall, that he could see. He looked around to make sure no one was paying attention, then brushed his thumb across the fingertips of his gloves to activate their sticky pads, jumped and caught the wall. (These things were seriously cool. Better than the gun.) His boots had similarly adhesive toes. Peter slithered easily to the top of the 15-foot wall and peered over the edge.

A few months before his mom got too sick to travel anymore, she had taken him to see a big dam somewhere on the Missouri River watershed. He didn't know the name of it; he just remembered standing on the dam with his mom and looking down at the concrete face of it falling away to spillways impossibly far below. 

Peter wrenched his mind out of that memory, away from the warm sensation of her hand wrapped around his own.

But this place made him feel the same swooping feeling in the pit of his stomach. The cliffside abutment of the plateau plunged several hundred feet below him. There were frozen cascades of ice dotting the face of the cliff, especially right below the wall, but also much farther down. Some of them seemed to be capping iron pipes or larger brick-faced openings in the wall. Sewers? Peter thought. They just dumped their sewage off the cliff? Eww. 

Far below, a river threaded its way through the rough and broken country at the base of the cliff: open pit mines, fallow fields, and dumped trash seemed to be most of what was down there.

He didn't think he could climb down the entire cliff. However, with the sticky pads in his gloves, climbing the outside of the wall and clambering around on the fortress wasn't out of the question at all. Peter leaned as far out from the wall as he dared. The wind buffeted him; snowflakes nested in his hair and went down the collar of his cut-down Ravager coat. It looked like there were openings in the wall below the fortress. Windows maybe? Could it continue down under the ground? He didn't see why not. It looked like some of them had bars on them.

"Are you gonna jump?" 

Peter flinched and looked down. The child staring up at him was about his age, or at least looked like it -- hard to tell with aliens. She -- he -- xe wore a ragged, too-large coat that looked like some kind of military gear, hands shoved in the pockets, and xir skin was a light yellow-green, with two little horns curling out of long, matted hair.

"No. I'm just looking." He let go and hopped down, bouncing lightly off the wall to land in the snow. It was a less graceful landing than he'd intended -- he stumbled and caught himself on the wall, just managing not to go down on his butt. 

Still, the alien kid looked impressed. What Peter had taken at first for mats of uncombed hair turned out to be fronds of some plantlike substance that moved independently of the wind, rippling over the shoulders of the filthy military coat.

"I don't suppose you know a way to get in there without going in the front door?" Peter asked, pointing along the wall to the fortress.

"You _want_ to go in there?" The child's soft, fluting voice was incredulous.

"I need to find somebody that got taken inside."

This produced a low, melodious whistle that Peter realized was something like laughter. "Your friend is dead, then."

Peter decided not to correct the "friend" part. Instead he took in the child's disreputable state. He had a few units in his pocket from pickpocketing practice earlier, before he'd decided to cut and run. "Hey, you wanna eat? 'cause I could eat."

The kid looked uncertain. "I'll buy if you tell me about that place," Peter said, and that clinched the deal.

They ended up at a lunch-counter-type place a few blocks down the wall. The place was crowded and dirty, but there was a sheltered, relatively warm area to eat, with heaters blasting hot air from under the edges of thin plastic sheeting. Peter got a green pudding-like thing with some crispy breadlike stuff to dunk in it. It looked similar enough to food he'd had elsewhere that he was pretty sure he could eat it. One advantage to traveling with Yondu: the pirate captain was used to feeding a crew from a variety of different planets and had a surprisingly good idea of what Terrans could safely eat. Beyond that, Peter had resigned himself to the risk of accidental poisoning as part of the price of not starving to death.

The plant-person child, whose name was Hradar, wolfed down a dish that seemed to be made out of mushrooms while telling him about the fortress. It was an old guard station and jail from back when warlords used to run the city. These days, according to the kid, it had been taken over by a group of Xurichik slavers slash bounty hunters. Peter wasn't sure if Xurichik was a planet of origin, a clan name, or some other kind of designation, but if that was the dino-guys he'd seen earlier, then he already knew what he needed to know, which was that they were trouble.

And of course Yondu had a bounty on his head. Of _course._

_He can probably get out on his own._ Yondu was invincible. He _couldn't_ be defeated or broken.

Except Peter had seen him getting the crap kicked out of him in trampled, bloody snow. He touched his coat, feeling the broken pieces of the arrow where he'd tucked them into one of the hidden inner pockets sewn into the coat's lining.

_I don't owe him a thing. This is my chance to get away._

Except ... get away and go where? He sure couldn't afford a ticket back to Earth, if there was even any way to get there from here. He'd be stuck on this stupid, cold, ugly ball of dirt, stealing not just for fun and on easy jobs that Yondu picked out for him, but to survive. He looked across the table at Hradar, gaunt and hollow-eyed in that too-big coat, wolfing down the mushroom stuff and mopping up the last of it with dark-colored bread. That was the kind of life he'd have here.

A tiny thought crept up from the depths of his brain, suggesting that Earth was a ball of dirt too, and he might not be able to fit himself back into the life of an ordinary Midwestern schoolkid after three years in outer space. He pushed that thought away. He was going to get back to Earth somehow, someday. _When I'm older. When I can get away from these stupid pirates and go HOME._

Meanwhile, if he could actually manage to rescue Yondu from bounty hunters, that had to count for a lot, right? Heck, the stupid jerk pirate would _owe_ him.

"So you've told me a lot about that place, except how to get into it."

Hradar looked up with a quick glimmer of multi-colored eyes. "You still want to get in? What'sa matter with you? Yeah, I know your friend's in there, but you're just gonna have to write him off. If he didn't have whatever they wanted, he's already dead. If not, he'll be on a slave transport soon, or off to whoever'll pay the most for him."

That thought made something cold coil around Peter's heart; it brought a surge of anger that was new and different from the anger he'd been living with for three years. "He's not dead," he said harshly. "He's too mean and ornery to die that easy. Look, I saw windows down there. Looked like old-time jail windows. You said the fortress used to be a jail. That part's underground, right? Down by the wall."

"That's right. But you can't get there." Hradar gave him a critical look. "Not unless your species has wings."

"No, I don't have wings." Peter passed the ball of his thumb over the tips of his gloves and felt the little grippers engage. "But I got something almost as good, if you can help me figure out a way to get out of there, with a grown-up who doesn't have wings either, once I get in."

 

***

 

When he got out of here, Yondu was definitely going to kill a whole lot of people.

While he was semi-conscious, stunned from the beating and the shock of whatever they'd done to his implant, they had locked a slave collar and cuffs onto him and thrown him into a bare prison cell. The only light and air came in through a window that was also open to the outdoors, so the cell was as cold as the air on this gods-forsaken part of the planet, and they'd taken his coat. Yondu's chains didn't let him reach the window, but he'd seen enough of the geography of the place, flying in, to have a guess where he was, and if so, that was one hell of a drop underneath that window.

This was an utterly stupid situation to be in. It pissed him off, hot anger helping wipe out the fear that otherwise might climb up and consume him. He couldn't believe he'd let a bunch of low-rent bounty-hunter _thugs_ get the drop on him. 

The thing he kept trying not to think about was that they'd been really well prepared. It was _him_ they were after, Yondu Udonta, specifically. His implant was still nonfunctional, sending painful little zings of nerve impulse -- like a badly smacked elbow -- flicking through his skull. Between that, what he was pretty sure was a concussion, a broken arm and a few broken ribs, he didn't like his odds of fighting his way out of here.

However, he'd do what he needed to do, just like he had for his entire life. They might have deprived him of his arrow, beat him up, and stripped his weapons from him. But he'd gotten out of more than a few prison cells in his time. 

Yondu sat up, waited out a surge of dizziness that threatened to send him back to the floor, and then leaned forward. Moving carefully to keep the spikes on the cuffs and collar from digging into his flesh any more than necessary, he worked the lock picks out of his left boot heel with fingers that felt a few sizes larger than normal. The explosive cord sewn into his belt would do for the door. Without the arrow, he didn't have the firepower for the revenge rampage these idiots deserved, which meant he'd have to go all the way back to his ship, fly it back here, and _then_ blow the damn fortress clean off the wall.

It was a good plan. A simple plan.

... a plan with a few flaws, and the first one was that, between the way that his vision kept blurring and neither his hands nor the lock would hold still, he was having trouble getting the locks on his wrists open. He cursed softly, steadied his hand against his thigh (it pushed the spikes through the skin, but he was beyond caring about that just now), and tried again.

The pick slipped again, striking a darker blue line across his thumb, and then the cuff _finally_ came open. Yondu wrenched off the bloody mess of it, leaving his wrist girdled in a ring of gore where the spikes had torn up his flesh, and hurled it away from him. After a moment to get his equilibrium back, he switched hands with the picks (great, he'd have to do this one with the hand on the arm he'd broke; that was gonna be fun) and had just started on the lock when a soft hiss came from the window.

"Yondu!"

He jerked, wrenching his arm with a searing agony that brought involuntary tears to his eyes, and dropped the pick; it clattered on the filthy floor. "What the hell?" Yondu muttered, looking up at the window, where a small, hunched figure was framed against the light.

"I found you!" Quill whispered cheerfully. "Only the third cell I tried, how's that for luck. Hang on, I think I can actually fit through ..."

He squirmed at the bars, muttered something under his breath, then carefully wriggled his way out of his coat, one arm at a time, and dropped it through the bars before squeezing through after it. Yondu had taught him various techniques for getting in and out of tight spaces (he wasn't that good at it himself, but he knew the basic idea, how to twist your shoulders and rib cage to present the smallest possible cross section) and Quill was a natural. 

Quill snatched up his coat, grinning all over his idiot face, and then the grin fell away and he hesitated when he realized he wasn't getting a very warm welcome.

"Boy," Yondu said, "what the _hell_ you think you're doin'?"

"Uh ... rescuing you? I guess? I mean," Quill said, crossing his arms defensively, "what the heck else would I be doing, breaking into prison for fun or something?"

"Wouldn't put it past you," Yondu muttered, and Quill scowled at him.

In all honesty, after the kid's loud and frequent insistence over the years on being sent back to Terra (where Ego would just send some other, even less scrupulous asshole to pick him up, so yeah, like _that_ was ever going to happen) Yondu had fully expected that, as soon as Peter realized he didn't have to worry about pursuit this time, the kid would've hightailed it for Terra or as close as he could get. Assuming he didn't manage to get himself scooped up by slavers in the meantime.

But ... no. He was here, sneaking into a prison to try to get Yondu out of it.

Yondu didn't have any idea what to say to that. He didn't know what to do about the way it made something warm open up in his chest, like a flower unfurling to the sun.

Fortunately he had the stabbing pain of ribs and arm and cracked skull to bring him back down to reality and the fact that he was chained to the wall in a prison cell. Also, Quill was doing something else, reaching into his coat to get something out of it.

"Brought you this," he said, a little bit hopefully, and Yondu could have laughed, if it wouldn't have hurt too much. The boy was holding out the broken pieces of his arrow.

"Won't do me no good, boy. Not only is it broke, but they're blockin' me. Some kind of jammer. Couldn't use it anyway." 

"Oh, well, fine." Quill's scowl settled back into place. "So if you don't want the arrow and you don't need my help --"

"Get over here and help me pick a lock, boy," Yondu growled, and Quill brightened as he stuffed the pieces of the arrow back into his coat; it was like the sun coming up all over that damn expressive face of his.

 

***

 

Once he got past the initial rush of unexpected delight (that Yondu was still alive) and gut-deep irritation (because the jerk was yelling at him again; it figured) Peter started noticing that Yondu was in really bad shape.

Yondu wasn't wearing a coat, leaving him bare-armed in weather that was below freezing. The fingers that pressed the lock picks into Peter's hands were ice-cold and sticky with dark-blue blood. Yondu's arm was bloody to the elbow, and Peter gave a tiny squawk of mingled alarm and disgust when he realized that the forearm was broken, the bones visibly pushing against the skin, and through it in some places.

"That can't be good for you!"

"Don't feel too good either, so how 'bout you pick this here cuff so we can get back to the ship and that nice well-stocked med bay?"

The lock on the cuff was stiff and crusted. With Peter's still-inexpert lock-picking skills, it took him longer than he'd like to get it to crack open, although Yondu was patient about it; he only murmured a slight correction when Peter applied the pick wrong. It wasn't until the cuff came open that Peter realized it was crusted with more than rust and dirt, when he saw the row of metal spikes that ringed the inside of the cuff, piercing Yondu's wrist like the thorns of an especially sadistic rose.

"Jesus!"

"Slave restraint cuff," Yondu growled. When Peter's slack hands fell away from the cuff, unsure how to get it off without hurting him, Yondu unceremoniously brought it up to his mouth and wrenched it off with his teeth. He dropped it to the floor in a splatter of dark blue blood, and spat after it. "Standard in the Kree Empire. Nice folks. I ever tell you I used to be a Kree battle slave?"

"No," Peter said in wide-eyed horror.

"Yeah, well, biggest bounties on me are in the Kree provinces, so unless you want to find out what it's like yourself, I suggest you get the collar off and we get out'n here."

"Collar?" Peter said faintly. Yondu tilted his head back and lifted his chin to reveal the band of black metal around his throat. "Uh ... does that one have spikes too?"

"What d'you think?"

So matter-of-fact about it, as if he didn't have _spikes_ in his _neck_ that every failed attempt at picking the lock, every time Peter accidentally twisted or pushed it, would drive deeper into his flesh.

Peter noticed, as he brought the lock picks up to the collar, that his hands were shaking. "Wait, hang on," he said, and stopped to take his gloves off with his teeth, one glove at a time. It wasn't really necessary; unlike Earth gloves, these were thin, responsive fabric that let him feel things almost as if he wore no gloves at all, even where the sticky pads were. But it gave him a moment to get himself under control.

"Boy," Yondu said wearily, "you gonna get an attack of the weak stomach over this, just give me the picks an' I'll do it myself."

By feel, under his own chin, with a broken arm. "It's okay, I've got it," Peter said. He blinked hard, blinking away the tears that had gathered in the corners of his eyes -- he genuinely didn't even know why -- and leaned forward to set the picks in the lock with hands that only trembled a little.

He wasn't sure if this lock was easier, or if he'd gained a little familiarity from the first one, but it cracked open faster than he'd expected. Shuddering, Peter helped Yondu pry off the collar. Dark blue blood slicked his fingers, warm and wet on rusty spikes caked with dried, older blood, which Peter was _really_ trying not to think too hard about. He dropped the awful thing and stepped back, wiping his hands on his pants and trying not to cry again.

Yondu gripped the wall with his good hand and pulled himself to his feet. Strength settled back over him like the coat he wasn't wearing; the pain lines in his face smoothed out as his features went hard again. Peter was a little bit surprised that he could see how much of it was for show, which made him have a thought he'd never had before, which was to wonder how much of Yondu's unbreakable facade was _always_ for show, living in a world that punished weakness with death.

But a moment later -- as Yondu's sharp eyes went from the door, to Peter, to the window -- Peter wondered if it really _was_ for show; it seemed more like Yondu had shoved off his pain and weakness into a box that he'd deal with later. Peter could almost see the wheels turning inside his head. Yondu might be a murderous, kidnapping space pirate, but he was smart, and he was good at stuff.

Peter's knees sagged with vast relief as he felt the weight of temporary responsibility slide off his shoulders. There was an adult around to take over. _He_ didn't have to make the plans; _he_ didn't have to get them out. Yondu could do it. He scrubbed at the corner of his eye with one dirty fist as he felt himself starting to tear up for the third time in just about as many minutes. Feeling the stickiness on his hands, he spread out his fingers and looked down at the blood, Yondu's blood, in the creases of his skin. He'd probably smeared it on his face too.

When had he just started to accept that blood came in all colors, blue and green and yellow and pink, not just Terran red?

"Think you can get back out on that wall, boy?" Yondu asked, and Peter flinched and looked up. "Get in one of them other windows?"

"Sure," Peter said quickly. "Easy as pie." He wasn't about to breathe a word of how terrifying that drop had been, how flimsy his grip on the slick wall as the wind tore at his body. Anyway, he was confident he could do it again. It had been fun, in the same numbing-terror kind of way as cracking his first safe.

"Right. You find an empty cell, get inside -- _carefully_ now, no messin' around, look both ways in the corridor -- an' open my door from the outside. Then you hotfoot yourself right back up that wall an' meet me back at the M-ship."

"Hey!" Peter protested. "But I --"

"You sassin' me, boy?" 

"No, it's just that I --"

"Get out that window and unlock my door 'fore a Kree transport gets here and we're both clapped into a matching set of them slave collars and sent off for arena fightin', you hear me? And then get your scrawny tail back to the ship or I'll sell you to the slavers myself."

Peter shot him a glare. In that one lovely minute of handing off responsibility, he'd forgotten what having adults in charge was actually like. Especially when the adults were space pirates. And it was abundantly clear that his feat of extraordinary agility and bravery had had the same impact on Yondu as everything else he'd done since he'd been on the _Eclector,_ which was to say, no effect whatsoever. If that old blue jerk even knew how to be grateful for anything, he sure wasn't wasting any of that gratitude on Peter.

"Yeah, fine, whatever," he snapped, and sulked back to the window, shedding his coat and pulling on his gloves for the squeeze through the bars.

If Yondu didn't want to hear that Peter had found them a perfectly good escape route, it was his problem.

 

***

 

Idiot kid left his coat behind. Either he hadn't been able to put it back on while clinging to the wall, or -- far more likely based on Yondu's experience with him -- he'd forgotten it completely in his huff over whatever he had a bug up his behind about _now_. Yondu was in too damn much pain, and too much of a hurry to get out of here, to even care what had upset the boy this time.

He gave the slave collar a vicious kick, sending it clattering across the floor -- didn't usually take out his frustration on objects, learned a long time ago that it doesn't do much good, but if ever there was an object that deserved it, that torture implement had earned his hatred a thousand times over. Didn't really want to say this around the kid, but if it came to getting sent back to the Kree, he'd rather step off the edge of the cliff.

He leaned down to pick up the kid's coat, gritting his teeth as the room swam around him. At first when the alarm went off, he thought it was just the ringing in his ears. Then the door to his cell slammed open, framing a small, shivering Quill with the corridor behind him full of red, flashing light.

"Dammit, boy!" Yondu snapped, shoving the kid's coat into his arms.

"The bars weren't wired for alarm, but the doors are!" Quill protested. "How was I supposed to know!"

There would have been tells. Kid had been in too much of a hurry to pay attention. But it wasn't the sort of mistake Yondu was going to beat up on him for. Life was a hard teacher, and it looked like this was the sort of situation likely to teach a brutally memorable lesson.

And now the kid had grabbed him by the hand of his uninjured arm and was trying to drag him in the exact wrong direction, throwing off his unstable equilibrium even worse than it already was.

"Front door's the other way, boy!"

"I know!" Peter yelled back over the klaxons. "I've got another way out! I tried to tell you, but you wouldn't listen!"

"What the hell you talkin' about?"

"I did just what you taught me, that's all," Peter shot back. "I took a look around and talked to people, and what I found out is, there's tunnels under the city -- whole maze of 'em, whole river too, it runs under the city an' comes out below --"

"You know how to get into these tunnels from here, boy?"

Peter shot him a look that was somehow both guilty and accusing. "How'm I supposed to know? I've never been in here before, an' _you_ said to --"

Yondu tried to cuff him in the head to knock off the backtalk, but missed. He didn't miss the boy's quick glance, startled and then something else.

They stumbled down a flight of stairs into what seemed to be some kind of storage level. Place was a maze, and Yondu was still desperately dizzy, trying to catch himself on the wall when his legs tried to go out from under him. He managed to keep himself upright on sheer willpower, legacy of a childhood's training in never, _ever_ giving away how sick or hurt he was. Nobody gave a damn if a battle slave got kicked in the head. By the standards of his childhood, a concussion and a broken arm and whatever the hell the implant was currently doing to his brain should be hardly enough to slow him down. From somewhere else in the building, he heard shouts and pounding feet.

He'd been thinking about trying to get his stuff back, his coat and the dozen or so knives and other stuff they'd confiscated from him, but it probably wasn't worth the likelihood he'd get killed in the attempt.

Peter drew the small blaster Yondu had given him from under his coat, gripping it in two shaking hands. "Gimme that," Yondu snapped, holding out a hand.

For whatever it was worth, the boy didn't even hesitate, just handed it over. Which was good, because an instant later, two guards charged around a corner. Even with double vision and no clear idea of which direction was up, Yondu nailed both of them with two shots on full power. The second shot tore open a heating line, and suddenly the corridor filled with steam.

Peter looked stunned, so Yondu gave him a hard shove with the hand holding the blaster, not toward the steam (jetting out of the pipe, it would've flayed their flesh from the bones) but down a lateral corridor. There were pipes aplenty around here, but whether any of them led to sewers or useful utility lines, he wasn't sure. Boy's exit strategy was stupid -- but Yondu couldn't help thinking it was also damn clever, because right now he didn't think he could fight his way out the front door, not without getting both of them killed. They just needed to find a way to get into those sewer tunnels from where they were.

There was a shuttered window at the end of the corridor. Yondu unceremoniously blew it open with the blaster and knocked bits of wood out of the frame so he could lean out into the icy wind, looking down the sheer drop plunging to the snow-covered forest far below. Yeah, _that_ did wonders for his dizziness, all right.

But he saw what he remembered seeing before, flying in. There were a bunch of outflow pipes in the wall, and one of them, a big one with an arched brick facade, wasn't that far away, just a little ways below the window, with a cascade of ice spilling out. Yondu gauged the distance and wished like hell he had his arrow, or a jet pack, or any damn thing. This was gonna suck balls.

"Think you can climb down there, boy?" he demanded.

"Uh, yeah, sure." Peter stared at him, wide-eyed. "What are _you_ gonna --"

"Go!" Yondu snapped, shoving him at the window. Guards were gonna be on them any minute.

At least Peter didn't hesitate, scrambling out the window onto the cliff face. He scurried to the mouth of the pipe -- giving Yondu a better idea of how big it was with Peter for scale. It'd definitely fit him, though it was going to be cramped.

Peter turned to look up, clinging precariously to the cliff face with sticky fingers and toes. "Hey, Yondu, there's a -- a metal thing, covering it up --"

"Get out'a the way." Yondu steadied the gun on the windowsill.

Peter retreated and waited, holding onto the wall while the wind whipped his gingery curls around.

The thought lurked in a corner of Yondu's brain that if he missed (always a possibility with the way his hand was shaking and his vision kept blurring in and out) he might actually hit Peter, killing him or knocking him off the wall at the very least. But he just didn't have the luxury of worrying about it. They were both going to die if they didn't get out of here.

\-- and the kid could've gone back to the shuttle and waited for him there. Instead he was here, risking his life to help Yondu break out of prison. 

'Course, he could also have gone back to the ship and called actual, _useful_ help from the _Eclector_ in orbit around the planet.

Yondu steadied the gun as much as he could and squeezed the trigger. There was a bright blue flash and the grill over the mouth of the wastewater outflow burst open with a loud _spang!_ of shattered metal. Peter looked up at Yondu with a brilliant grin of triumph.

"Get out of the way!" Yondu called down to him before he gave in to the urge to grin back.

"Yondu ..." Peter hesitated at the edge of the pipe, clinging to the wall, his scaled-down Ravager coat whipping in the wind. "D'you ... really think you can do this? I mean -- _how?"_

"You tellin' your Cap'n what he can or can't do?" Yondu stuffed the gun into his waistband and picked carefully at the bottom edge of his vest, getting hold of the tail end of the wire sewn into its lining.

"No, Yon -- Cap'n -- it's just --"

"Get in the damn pipe, boy!"

Peter disappeared into the pipe and a moment later his head poked out. Kneeling at the icy entrance with his small, gloved fingers gripping the edge, he stared up anxiously.

\-- and then ducked back as blaster fire sizzled down from above. Hell and damnation, the gig was up. They'd been spotted from above. So much for sending the boy back to the ship. The sewers were the only way out for both of them now.

Yondu finished pulling the full length of the coated wire out of his vest. There wasn't a lot of it, only about ten feet or so, but he knew that, unlike Peter's sticky gloves, it could hold his weight. He licked the tip and slapped it to the wall, engaging the one-time sticky charge, and then scrambled over the windowsill just as a bunch of the armored guys from earlier came in view at the end of the corridor.

He didn't even try to climb with one arm, just jumped with the wire tangled around his good hand and arm, and hit the end with a jarring shock that brought a searing line of blood to the surface of his skin. Peter, making tiny unhappy sounds, helped pull him into the sewer pipe with small, cold, frantic hands.

Yondu twitched the wire and it let go of the wall. He reeled it in after him as it pulled free of his bleeding skin.

Peter, sitting on the ice with his back against the rusty side of the pipe, stared up at him. "You're nuts," he declared.

"Yep." And really feeling the wind on his bare arms, too. Yondu reached behind him and swung the grate shut, and used the gun on a low power setting to fuse the metal to the frame. Wouldn't slow those guys down for long, but between the difficulty of getting to the pipe in the first place, and their size, they might take awhile to get an organized pursuit together. Yondu had to crouch to fit; those massive guys wouldn't be able to get in here at all.

"Well?" he told the kid, stuffing the wire into his pocket and trying to ignore the blood trickling down his fingers from the brand new abrasions cut deep in his arm. "This here's your escape route, so get going. If you got a light, that'd be good too."

Quill swallowed and scrambled to his feet. He reached into his pocket and came up with one of the little ring lights that Yondu had given him months ago, not more than a toy, but more than Yondu had right now, after those assholes had searched him and stripped him of anything they thought looked useful. Peter slipped it over his gloved finger and the light sparked to life. Aiming it ahead of them in the darkness, Peter looked back at him anxiously and then led the way deeper into the catacombs.


	2. Chapter 2

Peter wasn't even sure if they had a plan, but it still felt like this whole situation wasn't really going according to it.

He looked behind him at Yondu as they worked their way deeper into the maze of wastewater tunnels beneath the city, in the cold blue-white pool of light cast by his (super cool, always nice to have a chance to use) alien flashlight ring. The thing was, he'd sort of thought that Yondu was going to take over now and lead them out of the tunnels with the same self-assurance that the pirate captain did everything else. There never had been any doubt in Peter's mind that Yondu could do that, in spite of never having been in the tunnels before.

Except Yondu wasn't doing that. Instead he was hunched over and quiet, and the hand gripping Peter's blaster kept resting against the wall, like he needed it for support. His other arm, the broken one, was pressed against his chest. He followed Peter as if Peter knew what he was doing. Which Peter very much did NOT. He just wanted an adult to take over and do everything, even if that adult was, unfortunately, Yondu.

The only thing Peter could think to do was try to follow the flowing water. When he was seven, he'd spent a week at summer camp, which had included some wilderness orienteering practice, tailored for second-graders. The whole experience seemed impossibly childish to him now (he couldn't help thinking that the Yondu version would probably just be dropping him off in the woods somewhere and expecting to find his own way out, probably while being chased by alien monsters). But he remembered the orienteering guide telling the children that if they got lost, they should try to follow a stream or river, because it would flow downhill and would probably come to a road or a town eventually.

This wasn't quite the same thing, but it was the only thing he could think of. If they went down, they'd come out at the base of the cliff, and water flowed down, so that should be useful, right?

In actual practice, it wasn't nearly as easy as following a stream. The water kept flowing into places they couldn't go, which meant they had to backtrack and find a way around. Their boots were waterproof, but it was impossible to avoid getting splashed, making them even colder. And there were people hunting them in the tunnels. So far, they'd been lucky enough not to run into any of them, but Peter could hear rough voices echoing through the maze.

He was freezing, exhausted, and terrified. It was starting to feel like he'd never been warm, never been safe. Even the _Eclector_ would feel like a haven right now.

Yondu stumbled and growled a sudden curse. Peter looked back at him anxiously. The thought crossed his mind that Yondu might actually pass out (it was actually impressive he was still walking around, as bad as he looked), and _that_ was a horrifying thought on several levels. Peter knew for sure he couldn't carry him. But even worse --

_I'm not supposed to be the one in charge!_

Yondu was ... he was just _there,_ a force of nature, terrifying and unstoppable. He was the foundation on which Peter's life on the _Eclector_ was built, and Peter might spend a lot of time hating him for being a murderous, awful, child-abducting space pirate, and for a hundred other things -- for hitting him, for putting him on disgusting deck-cleaning details, for making stupid rules, for not letting him learn to fly an M-ship 'til his legs were long enough to reach the pedals (his legs were totally long enough! jerk!), for almost getting him killed on several different planets. For taking him away from Earth before his awesome space dad could come and get him, so he'd never ever get to know his real dad and it was all Yondu's fault.

But through all that, Yondu was the sturdy bedrock at the bottom of Peter's new life. He couldn't be defeated, couldn't be stopped, couldn't be killed.

He wasn't ever supposed to look like this: shaky and hurt, sick and weary, looking like he was one stiff breeze from toppling over.

Shoving Peter's blaster through his belt, Yondu reached up to finger the scarred skin around his implant, and Peter frowned at him. At least he didn't seem to be passing out. He looked more speculative than anything else.

"What's wrong?" Peter asked hesitantly.

"Nothin'." Yondu glanced over at him, a flicker of red eyes in the glow of Peter's ring flashlight. "We must be out'a range of whatever they were using to jam me. I can feel the fin again."

"Does that mean you can use the arrow again?"

"Arrow's broke, remember?"

"Oh." Peter drooped. "Yeah. Right."

 

***

 

Having the implant back online made it a little easier to think. Yondu hadn't realized how much it had been messing with his head 'til it wasn't.

'Course, he still felt like utter shit, between the concussion and the broken arm and the winter's cold cutting through his sleeveless shirt. It was warmer in the tunnels than outside -- still cool, but above freezing, plus no wind, and a few of these tunnels were actually almost warm enough to be comfortable; Yondu guessed those were adjacent to steam ducts or hot-water pipes. Still, it was damn chilly down here and it was wearing on him.

When there was movement up ahead in the tunnel, cold-dulled reflexes slowed him -- perhaps fatally so -- but were also the only reason why he didn't shoot Peter, who flung himself between Yondu and whatever he was pointing the blaster at. "Yondu, no!" Peter gasped, his ring light jabbing Yondu in the eyes, spiking his headache worse than it already was. "Don't shoot! That's Hradar! It's my local contact, just another kid like me, the one that told me about the tunnels. Hradar, wait, don't go!"

Yondu kept the blaster raised -- like he was gonna take Peter's word for it; kid was so trusting he might as well have SUCKER stamped on his forehead. He caught a glimpse of a swirl of coattails, pale skin and darker hair, as the other child disappeared into the shadows. Yondu tried to shoulder Peter out of the way so he had a clear shot, but Peter refused to be budged. It was like he either didn't believe Yondu would shoot right through him if he had to, or didn't care.

"No, wait, don't leave!" Peter called. "Yondu, stop _scaring_ 'em."

Yondu fisted his hand around the blaster's grip and cuffed Peter in the side of the head, but all it did was snap his head back and make him glare up at Yondu; he didn't even move. Kid was getting one hell of an attitude. Yondu was both impressed and annoyed.

"How you know that brat's not with the bounty hunters, boy?"

"I just do, okay?"

"Not good enough," Yondu gritted out. Damn it, he felt like hell and he didn't need to deal with this; he oughta just knock the kid flat and shoot whoever was down here in the tunnels with them on general principles. "Galaxy don't care shit for your ideals. It's gonna fuck you over in six dozen ways, you go around thinkin' you can trust somebody you met once, in a town like this one; what's wrong with you?"

He saw an argument building behind Peter's furiously screwed-up features, but then the look on the kid's face turned calculating. "We can pay 'em, right? You've got money back on the M-ship, right? You always do."

"Not so loud, idiot," Yondu hissed at him.

"Even if the bounty hunters are paying, we can pay more, right? If Hradar leads us out of the tunnels?"

The hell of it was, they did need a guide. It was obvious Peter didn't know these tunnels well enough to get them out, and it wasn't like Yondu had a better idea. His head was killing him.

"See if you can get 'em back here. But," he added, lowering the gun, "this is on your head, an' if that brat gets us killed, my boys are serving up Terran stew in the mess tonight."

"That doesn't even make sense. You can't eat me if you're dead," Peter informed him with a child's stubborn certainty, and turned to call softly into the tunnel ahead of them, "Hradar? Hey, it's okay. He's not going to shoot you. I promise."

The kid emerged cautiously into the pool of light cast by Peter's ring. Yellow skin, fernlike green hair -- looked like an Orseelian. Didn't often see those this far from the Hub worlds, but then, Tirenth tended to attract all sorts.

One of Ego's kids had been Orseelian. Bright little thing and totally fearless, hardly scared of the Ravagers at all -- and Yondu shoved those memories back into the locked box in his head where that kind of memories lived.

"I thought your friend was gonna be a kid," Hradar whispered, looking up at Yondu with big, scared eyes that glittered a thousand shades of iridescent colors in the ring light. The other Orseelian kid had had eyes like that too.

( _Jenah,_ whispered a treacherous part of his brain, _kid's name was Jenah_ ...)

"No," Peter said, "he's a grown-up, but I'm _so_ glad you came, 'cause these tunnels are super confusing and we don't know how to get out. We'll pay you if you lead us out," he finished in a rush. 

"You know, those Xurichik guys are all over down here," the kid said anxiously. "Lookin' for you."

"We know," Peter said, oblivious to the look Yondu was giving him. "'s why we need to get out of here, right?"

The kid stared fearfully around Peter at Yondu, and Yondu thought about how he could just put the gun to the kid's head and make xem lead them out of here. 

Instead, he went down to one knee with a faint, involuntary grunt of pain as the motion compressed his ribs, making himself look shorter and less intimidating to a child. "Boy here's tellin' the truth. You help us, we help you. That sound good?"

After an endless hesitation, the Orseelian child gave a shy nod.

"Think you can get us to the spaceport? These tunnels go that far?"

Another hesitant nod.

 

***

 

It wasn't exactly easier with a guide. They clambered through old bricked-in passages (some of which had Yondu bending nearly double, clenching his teeth against the pain of cracked ribs, the dizziness of concussion) while the kids darted on ahead. Sometimes they crouched and waited while their pursuers pounded through an adjacent tunnel, cursing and muttering as they forced their huge, armored bodies down passageways that could barely accommodate them. It was only due to the narrowness of most of these tunnels, Yondu knew, that they hadn't been caught already.

Crawling like a rat in a trap. If he'd had his arrow, he'd have slaughtered every last mother's son of those bastards; instead he had to sneak around like a child, like a coward -- like a _slave,_ hiding in the ventilation ducts to avoid punishment. 

Damn this miserable fucking day.

As they made their way up a flight of narrow brick stairs (slick with old moisture, the air temperature hovering just above freezing), Peter came back from conferring with the Orseelian kid up ahead. "Uh, so, Hradar says we're gonna come out in a junkyard just behind the spaceport. From there it's a pretty straight shot to the ship."

"Yeah, an' you standin' here tellin' me this makes me think it ain't gonna be that easy."

"Er, it's _mostly_ that easy." Peter chewed his lip, and Yondu wearily thought about cuffing him across the face and smacking the information out of him, but before he could work his way up to it, Peter came out with it on his own. "Hradar's used to kid-sized people. The exit xe's thinking of, you won't fit. We gotta go into a tunnel that's used by the local train network an' come up through the public gates, an' that's gonna be a long way 'round, not to mention whole lotta official-type people, Hradar says."

"Show me the exit," Yondu said grimly.

Peter backed away from the look on his face. "Uh, okay. C'mon."

At the top of the stairs, there was a little bricked-in platform. Yondu looked around by the light of Peter's ring. It had probably been part of the utility network at some point, but had been sealed off by later renovations. All cities had that kind of thing, as new architecture endlessly overwrote the old.

"Here," Peter murmured. He held out his hand, shining the light into a slot in the wall, where a newly bricked-in wall didn't quite meet the old, leaving a gap that slanted slightly upward. A sharp chill came down it, and when Yondu leaned into the space, he glimpsed blue-tinted light at the end and felt the wind on his face, bitter with the clawing winter cold. The bottom of the shaft was drifted with dead leaves and snow.

Kid had a point. No way Yondu was thin enough to fit through there. It'd be a hard fit for Peter, even.

Good thing he hadn't had to use the explosive belt on the cell door.

"Where'd the kid get off to?" Yondu asked, sticking the gun in the back of his pants so he could unlace the belt.

"Hradar's outside, scouting for another way --"

"Can you get through there?" Yondu interrupted.

Peter looked through the gap. "Yeah, I guess so," he said with no particular relish.

Yondu glanced up at the low ceiling of the space they were in. Pretty good odds the explosion was gonna bring the whole thing down, but he still figured it was better than having to go out into the public tunnels. The Xurichik had gone to this much trouble to catch him for the bounty; they weren't gonna leave an exit near the spaceport unguarded. "Do it. Get clear. Holler back to me when you're out."

"What are you going to -- oh." Peter's eyes widened slightly as he watched Yondu priming the end of the explosive cord. 

"If I don't get out," Yondu said, carefully splitting the cord ends one-handed, "you get back to the M-ship an' call the _Eclector,_ tell 'em what happened."

"Wait, are you not going to --"

"You hear what I said? Get in there an' move! Oh, wait." Yondu gripped the cord in his teeth to free his hand, and held out the blaster. Peter took it, looking up at him with a look that Yondu didn't like. There was a whole world of worry in those wide child's eyes, and Yondu wondered where he'd gone wrong, to make this child that he was trying to rear as a Ravager worry that much for _him._ So he made his voice as hard as possible when he snapped, "Hang onto that for me 'til I'm out. Now go!"

The urge to obey was too ingrained, conditioned at arrow-point, with threats and slaps. Peter sidled into the gap in the brick, before retreating a step and shuffling the blaster around to the side of his hip where it wasn't in the way. He paused and pulled the light-ring from his finger. "Here," he said, holding it out. "You're gonna need light."

Good thinking. And not a good sign of Yondu's state of mind that he hadn't thought of it. "Yeah," he said, taking it from the kid. The ring expanded automatically to fit his thicker finger.

"Yondu --"

"Go!"

Peter shut up and squeezed himself into the gap. Yondu got the belt ready to go, and waited while it pulsed warm in his hand, until Peter's voice echoed back to him: "I'm out!"

Yondu connected the two wires, flung the thing into the gap, and dodged backward.

There was nowhere to take shelter, so he flattened himself against the wall at right angles to the one he was blowing. The primitive det-cord didn't have anything like a timer, so the detonation came almost immediately, the flare of smoke and flame and a hard, gut-punching _whunk_. Part of the wall blew out; Yondu covered his head with his arm. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, but the whole thing didn't come down on him with several tons of rocks. Small favors and all that.

As soon as the bricks stopped tumbling, he was fighting his way through the dust cloud into the enlarged gap. It was still a tight fit, but he stumbled out the other side into a dull blue winter evening, with icy wind stinging his skin. He didn't have to ask where the spaceport was: it was right in front of them, lit up bright as day with the lights ringing the outer fence. 

The two kids were just emerging from behind a piece of tarped-over maintenance equipment, not nearly far enough away, grinning all over their stupid faces.

And from the other direction -- yelling, the slam of the door of some kind of vehicle. The smiles fell off the kids' faces. Explosion must've got somebody's attention. Damn it.

"Gun!" Yondu ordered, holding out his hand. Peter handed it over without a hesitation. "Move!"

They ran through stacks of pipes and barrels, snow crunching under their feet. There was no real plan to it; at this point, it was every man (or kid) for himself. Still, the kids were sticking close to him, and when Yondu stumbled to a halt before the wide-open stretch of snow-covered ground reaching ahead to the fence, so did the kids. No cover. All they could do was make a run for it --

And then their pursuers caught up, in a blue crackle of gunfire, and the strobe of lights stabbing across them.

It was instinct, pure damn animal instinct that made Yondu spin around, shoving the kids behind him instead of getting off the first shot, which meant _their_ first targeted shot seared across his side rather than taking Peter in the head. Yondu hissed in pain and fired back, raking them with the blaster on its highest setting, all too aware that the kids' only cover was him. It was over in seconds.

"Anybody shot?" he panted, resisting the urge to press his hand to the searing pain across his ribs. The shot itself would've cauterized it, so there was no bleeding, and touching it (he knew from experience) would just make it hurt more.

"Uh, no," Peter said, huge-eyed. "Yondu, did he just shoot --"

"If you ain't hurt, then _run_ , dammit!"

 

***

 

Peter got to the fence ahead of Yondu (weaving, his arm close to his side, the broken one pressed to his chest) and Hradar, who looked panicked out of xir wits. Peter drew his knife, fumbled with the settings before he remembered the one that would cut through steel, and then sliced it with great sweeping arcs of his arm.

The asphalt of the spaceport was snow-free, somehow kept warm from below. Peter couldn't remember where the M-ship was, but Yondu took the lead. Nobody was following them at the moment. Whoever had been shooting at them was dead, and Peter knew he shouldn't be glad about that (Mom wouldn't have wanted him to be glad about that) but he was.

And he was also glad when the M-ship's orange and white exterior loomed out of the swirling snow ahead of them. The hatch cracked open as Yondu punched in the code. Warm air flooded out around them, thick with the smell of electronics and metal and unwashed floors, and some part of Peter cried out gratefully: _Home!_

Yondu muttered a thankful-sounded curse and was already dialing the heat up to maximum before the ship's hatch had even slammed shut. "You," he snapped, pointing at Hradar. "Sit. Don't touch anything. Quill, stop 'em from touchin' anything. Sit on 'em if you have to."

It didn't look like that would be necessary; the alien child had sat down as indicated, hands clasped anxiously in xir lap. Peter instead dogged Yondu's steps up to the flight deck. "Can I fly the ship?"

"What? No! 'course not, you don't know how." Yondu had stopped along the way to grab a grubby blanket from one of the seats and, with the blanket wrapped clumsily around his shoulders, knelt to tinker one-handed with the console of the pilot's chair. Peter watched in wide-eyed fascination, trying to guess what he was doing -- oh, he was routing the power from both arms of the console to just the one, so he could fly it one-handed.

"But I do know how," Peter tried. "You took me out an' let me fly a little bit on my not-a-birthday last year --"

"In _space!"_ Yondu snapped, twisting two wires together with fingers that trembled; the wire kept sliding out of them. "With nothin' to run into for a thousand klicks in any direction! Takeoffs an' landings are the hard part. You try it here, you gonna not only kill us but whoever's under us when you crash on the city." The wire slipped out of his blood-slick fingers for the second time. He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. "Make yourself useful an' gimme that crimper tool there. D'int I tell you to watch the kid?"

"The kid's not doin' nothing," Peter said, after a quick look down into the ship's belly to make sure Hradar was still sitting in the same place (xe was). He handed Yondu the tool and tried to convince himself that Yondu knew what he was doing, that he wasn't going to pass out mid-takeoff and send the ship down in a fireball.

The right-hand control grid fired up, and Yondu swung around into the pilot's seat. "Strap in," he ordered, blood-stained fingers curling around the control handle.

"Hey, Hradar, hold onto something!" Peter yelled down, and threw himself into the copilot's chair. As he strapped the belts across his chest, he noticed that Yondu's hand, which had been shaking like a leaf earlier, was rock steady on the controls, although it looked like Yondu was putting every ounce of willpower he had into keeping it that way.

After all of that, liftoff was disappointingly anticlimactic, really just about like normal. The ship shuddered a little as the wind buffeted it, and swooped low over the city.

"Why aren't we going up?" Peter asked.

"Got a debt to cash in first," Yondu snarled through clenched teeth.

The plateau fell away beneath them, and the ship heeled around so it was facing the cliff. It looked different from this angle, but the fortress was instantly recognizable. Peter sucked in a breath as Yondu, wearing a fierce grin with no humor in it, pressed the firing stud. Explosions blossomed on the cliff face, and parts of the fortress peeled off, falling into the void in an eruption of violence.

It all seemed so bloodless from here, completely silent on the screen. Still, Peter thought about all those people living in the city, people like Hradar, as explosions rocked the city streets and parts of the railing along the edge of the plateau crumbled away.

"You're gonna kill somebody," he protested, clinging to the arms of his seat as the ship rocked in the capricious winds. They were so close to the cliff that he thought there was a very real possibility Yondu might not be able to hold it steady and shoot at the same time, especially one-handed. A small margin for error might send the ship slamming into the cliffside.

"That's the point, kid." 

Pieces crumbled from the cliff as more of the fortress collapsed into the abyss.

"No -- I mean --" Peter subsided; it was too late anyway. There was nothing left of the fortress but a gaping, dust-shrouded hole in the cliff face, with a couple of water pipes spouting their thin cascades over the edge. Yondu wheeled the ship around and tilted the nose toward the stars.

"Never leave an enemy at your back, boy," he told Peter. "Never. They knew who I was. Knew how to deal with the arrow. Can't be having none of that."

 

***

 

They dropped off Hradar in a city on the other side of the planet, to Peter's massive disappointment. He'd desperately hoped that he could talk Yondu into taking Hradar with them; he loved the idea of having another kid his age on the ship.

"We ain't in the business of carryin' passengers an' we sure as hell ain't no orphanage," Yondu told him bluntly. He'd taken the time to shoot himself up with painkillers from the ship's small medbay (fetched by Peter at Yondu's order during the short hop around the planet), but he still looked absolutely terrible, with smudges of darker blue under his eyes and the bruises on his face even more visible by the better light on the ship.

"You kept _me,"_ Peter said sullenly.

"Everybody gets one moment of total crazy in their lives," Yondu muttered. He rummaged under the seat and tossed a small leather bag to Peter. It clinked. "Give the kid that 'fore you turn 'em loose."

So they left Hradar in a strange city where it was still summer, in a park with huge polka-dot flowers draped over benches, with a bag of units clasped in one small hand: enough for food and a place to stay and, most importantly, passage on a ship off Tirenth, going somewhere better. 

_I could've stayed too,_ Peter thought, looking down from the M-ship's flight deck at Hradar's small face turned up to watch them leave. By now, thanks mostly to thieving, Peter had a pretty good idea of how the units-to-supplies exchange rate worked, and that bag had enough to get both him and Hradar offworld. If he'd gone with Hradar, how would Yondu have stopped him? Peter lived in fear of the arrow, but Yondu didn't have the arrow right now.

He sank down in his seat, folded his arms over his chest, and glanced over at Yondu: hunched into the blanket, steering one-handed, looking like he was keeping himself from passing out through pure applied self-control. And he thought about the way Yondu had spun around to put himself between Peter and the bounty hunters, just as casual as anything. Peter could still faintly smell scorched flesh; he wasn't sure if it was just the sensory memory of that blue-white energy bolt crackling across Yondu's side (rather than frying Peter's brains) or if Yondu actually had been blistered so badly the smell still lingered.

Maybe it wasn't just fear of the arrow making him stick around, not just fear of the wide galactic unknown. But he didn't want to examine that thought too closely.

"Hey," Peter spoke up before he could lose his nerve. "We're in space now. Nothing to crash into. You want me to take over flying for a little while?"

Yondu gave him an exhausted glare, and then flicked a switch on his console. "Sure."

"Wait, what?" Peter sat forward eagerly, and the ship's nose dipped as his hands jerked on the controls, giving him a brief glimpse of the white-swirled marble of the planet falling behind them.

"Keep 'er straight," Yondu rasped out with exasperated patience, hunching down in the chair and pulling the blanket more tightly around his shoulders. "Light hand on the controls, boy -- _light_ hand, how many times I told you that? Don't clutch on fit to break 'em off. Jus' keep 'er pointed straight; she flies herself out here, just about."

Peter gave a little shiver of excitement and managed to loosen up his hands on the controls. He opted to ignore that last bit, because keeping the ship pointed straight was _not_ easy no matter what Yondu said. Maybe it seemed easy if you'd been flying for approximately a zillion years, like certain old people he wasn't going to mention --

"An' you give me back the controls 'fore we dock with the _Eclector,_ boy, or you ain't never takin' out one o' my ships 'til you're old enough for grandbabies."

"Yeah, whatever." Peter was barely listening. The ship was so responsive; it was like a living thing, the lightest touch of his hands to the finely tuned controls causing it to skitter forward like a waterbug on a pond. A lot about life on board the _Eclector_ was a total mess, but Yondu always made sure the actual working parts of the ships were in good shape, because it was on the ships that their lives depended.

_I'm in space,_ Peter thought, trying to keep his hands as steady as possible. _I'm in space, flying an actual spaceship. I just escaped from bounty hunters with a space pirate. Me. I did that. Peter Jason Quill._

"Can I do a loop?" he asked, grinning so hard he could barely talk.

"Whatever, sure, jus' don't break anything, because if you do --"

"You'll let the crew eat me, yeah, I know." Peter nudged the controls. He just meant to put the ship through a tiny little roll, but as he felt it start to turn, felt the acceleration push him back into the seat's padded cradle and the controls vibrate in his hand, excitement took over and he ended up spinning them in a wild, delighted corkscrew, finally flattening out as the lights of the _Eclector_ glimmered up ahead. 

And when he flashed Yondu a grin of pure delight, there was a little of the same in the jagged-toothed grin that answered back.

 

***

 

Yondu lost sight of the kid once they were back on the _Eclector._ Main thing he needed right now was something better than the M-ship's emergency stash of painkillers.

He picked the stuff up from the medbay himself, didn't bother calling the doc down. As the captain, he didn't have the luxury of being hurt -- being weak. About the only thing that could get him into the medbay's surgical cradle was if someone else dragged him there.

Instead he took a handful of supplies off to his quarters where he shot himself up with heavy-grade painkillers and then spent an uncomfortable half hour wrapping his arm in an immobilizer-stimulator binding, sealing the cuts and disinfecting the burn on his side. It wasn't pretty, but all he really needed was to patch himself up enough to get by.

Needed to tell the tailor he was gonna need a new coat. Damn. He'd liked that coat. First things first: he sent off a quick message to the first mate letting him know they were back on board. Or tried to; he got the engineer's assistant instead -- Kraglin. Sharp kid, sharp enough that he took in the bruises on Yondu's face at first glance. "What the hell happened to you, Cap'n?"

"Had a brush with some bounty hunters on-planet." Yondu gave him a fierce, mirthless grin. "Took care of it. Be a good boy an' tell Tezan we can pull out'a orbit anytime. Oh, an' if anyone bothers me while I'm gettin' shut-eye, I'll whistle 'em off to the great beyond."

Kraglin winced. "Will do, Cap'n."

Yondu waved off the screen, and lay flat for a minute until he mustered the energy to reach under the bed to pour himself a drink. Something he'd just said nagged at the back of his bruised and tired brain.

... The arrow. Seven hells. The kid still had it, or rather, the pieces of it. Yondu waved a hand at the screen again. "Kraglin, you see Quill anywhere around, tell him I need to see him."

"Is that an exception to the thing where you'll skewer anybody who goes near your quarters, or --"

Yondu extinguished the question in mid-sentence with a flick of his hand. 

He was propped up against the wall, buried in furs (still shivering slightly) and flicking through messages on the screen with a drink near to hand, when Peter marched in. The damn kid was the only person on the ship who came into the Captain's quarters without knocking and waiting for permission. The little runt wasn't afraid of anything, and Yondu had long since learned to pick his battles where Peter was concerned, and save the _real_ threats, the smacks upside the head, the yelling for when it mattered. It was worth letting go of most things that didn't involve the little idiot actually doing anything that was likely to get himself or someone else killed.

In this case, Peter was using both hands to carry a tray containing enough food for about three people, half-assedly tossed on the tray any which way. Yondu gave it a look, and then gave _him_ a look. Peter stared belligerently back at him.

"Kraglin said you wanted to see me an' he also said to bring you food. So ... here."

Huh. That Kraglin kid had initiative. Yondu decided it'd be a good idea to think about giving him some more responsibilities ... where Yondu could keep an eye on him. Initiative was good, but undirected initiative was where mutinies came from.

Peter set the tray beside the bed and swiped a hunk of bread off the edge of it, stuffing half of it into his mouth as he climbed up on the foot of the bed. Yondu scowled at him.

"You eatin' my food, boy?"

"I'm hungry," Peter retorted indistinctly. "I was eating when Kraglin found me an' sent me up here. So sue me. What'd'ya want?"

Definitely got a mouth on him. Kid was either gonna be one hell of a Ravager one of these days, or get himself spaced for shooting his mouth off once too often. Still a toss-up which way that one would go.

"You still got my arrow," Yondu said. "I need it back."

Peter looked startled. "Oh. Yeah. I forgot." He extracted a fistful of arrow fragments from his inside coat pocket and held it out. Yondu opened his hand and Peter dropped the pieces into his palm.

"Can you fix that?" Peter asked, leaning forward.

"Fixed it before." But never from this much damage. Yondu spread out the pieces in his lap, arranging them in order. At least it was all here. Kid had been thorough. Not that he was going to praise him for it or anything. No sense letting it go to his head.

Anyway, it wasn't like the kid needed encouragement, hanging out on Yondu's feet and sprawled all over the bed like he was. Peter reached over to pick up a piece of sweet bread off the tray. It just figured, kid was told to bring Yondu food and ended up stocking it with all his _own_ favorites.

"So I can fly the ship pretty good now, right?"

"Yeah, whatever," Yondu muttered, turning one of the arrow pieces to the light to check the damage to the connections.

"So, I can prob'ly dock it now too, right?"

"If it'll shut up your whinin'," Yondu said absently, fitting together two pieces experimentally, "then sure, we can work on that."

"'Cause if I knew how to do takeoffs an' shit, then I could'a flown it over and rescued you from -- wait, you said yes?"

He wasn't about to repeat himself.

Peter laughed and rolled over on the bed, looking at Yondu with sparkling eyes. "When? Tomorrow? Can we do it tomorrow?"

"We'll do it when I'm ready for it, now shut up or leave."

Surprisingly, the kid shut up. Eventually, when Yondu looked up from the puzzle he was slowly assembling, he figured out why. The heap of Terran kid on the foot of his bed had fallen asleep.

Goddamn ... stupid ... kid.

Yondu levered himself painfully out of bed and limped over to get some tools from a shelf for working on the arrow. When he came back, he reached for a scrap of fur blanket thrown over a chair beside the bed, and tossed it carelessly over the boy before crawling back into bed. It wasn't worth the pain in the ass of waking him up and chasing him out.

Thing was, when it came right down to it, he couldn't find much fault with how the kid had handled himself down on Tirenth. Oh, sure, the most useful thing he could've done was go back to the M-ship, call up to the _Eclector,_ and get some actual, _useful_ help. But who knows that putting any of these bozos in charge of a rescue would've have gotten everyone in the fortress, Yondu included, blown to bits in some sort of botched assault. Anyway, Yondu completely understood the urge to handle things on his own. Kid had gone in smart, he'd gone in sneaky, he'd found a local guide and come up with a plan; in short, he'd shown a whole lot of both cleverness and guts.

So yeah, maybe Yondu could use some of the down time while his bones were knitting to show the brat the finer points of piloting the M-ship.

Maybe it'd come in handy someday.

Maybe it'd be kinda fun.

Peter slept on his feet in a warm fur-covered sprawl, and Yondu wasn't about to admit that it was kinda nice to have the company as he worked on the arrow in a pleasant painkiller haze, long into the shipboard night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reference to Peter's not-a-birthday: Heh, so. For purposes of this story, anyway, my general headcanon there is that Peter tried to explain his cultural concept of birthdays and made no headway, especially since the calendars are different and he doesn't even know when his birthday is, but Yondu eventually caved and showed him how to fly the ship as a sort of belated, non-birthday, NO OCCASION WHATSOEVER ~~present~~ event.


End file.
